Terrance Hayes

presents

American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin

This event includes a book signing

Date

Jun
20
Wednesday
June 20, 2018
7:00 PM ET

Location

Harvard Book Store
1256 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138

Tickets

This event is free; no tickets are required.

Harvard Book Store welcomes National Book Award–winning poet TERRANCE HAYES for a discussion of his latest book of poetry, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin.

About American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin

In seventy poems bearing the same title, Terrance Hayes explores the meanings of American, of assassin, and of love in the sonnet form. Written during the first two hundred days of the Trump presidency, these poems are haunted by the country's past and future eras and errors, its dreams and nightmares. Inventive, compassionate, hilarious, melancholy, and bewildered—the wonders of this new collection are irreducible and stunning.

Praise

“Hayes addresses this marvelous series of 70 free-verse sonnets to his potential assassin: a nameless, faceless embodiment of America’s penchant for racially motivated violence. The poems are redolent of his signature rhythmic artistry and wordplay . . . Inventive as ever, Hayes confronts America’s myriad ills with unflinching candor, while leaving space for love, humor, and hope.” —Publishers Weekly

“With this incomparable collection, Hayes joins others in taking on the sonnet, reinvigorating its form and reimagining the possibilities of American literature.” —Booklist

"You will find all of [Hayes'] signature pleasures and provocations in this new collection: dense lyricism, associative wordplay, the political, the interpersonal . . . explorations and interrogations of race and gender and sex and the body and violence and power and history and time." —Kenyon Review

“Hayes’ writing demonstrates a serious commitment to revising, extending, and advancing American poetry while recording, celebrating, and mourning black American life. These aesthetic and intellectual preoccupations also charge American Sonnets.” —Walton Muyumba, The Los Angeles Times

Terrance Hayes
Terrance Hayes

Terrance Hayes

Terrance Hayes is the author of Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books are Wind In a BoxHip Logic, and Muscular Music. His honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 2014 MacArthur Fellowship. How To Be Drawn, his most recent collection of poems, was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award and received the 2016 NAACP Image Award for Poetry.

Harvard Book Store
1256 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138

Walking from the Harvard Square T station: 2 minutes

As you exit the station, reverse your direction and walk east along Mass. Ave. in front of the Cambridge Savings Bank. Cross Dunster St. and proceed along Mass. Ave for three more blocks. You will pass Au Bon Pain, JP Licks, and TD Bank. Harvard Book Store is located at the corner of Mass. Ave. and Plympton St.

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